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Thanks for these interesting and positive replies -- though disagreement is of course also welcome. I thought Jack was a fellow for some time, and thought Our Lady was female until just now.
kovacs, I'd be interested in how you felt reactions to you changed (if indeed they do) if you took on a female / female-sounding suit*. All the current talk about how women are recieved on Barbelith has made me think about the extent to which I have (consciously or otherwise) presented as male or at least not corrected people who assumed I was male since joining the board, and I'd like to know if you found that reactions to you changed at all from the opposite perspective.
Well, I think the only board I have presented on as female is Handbag.com, which is a female-oriented portal. Men are welcome to post, so I wasn't trying to slip under the net, but they are responded to differently -- flirted with, or treated as potential perverts, and sometimes their motivation in being on the board at all is challenged (irrelevantly I think) when men get into a debate on there with women. For instance, if a man was arguing that "Just Like Heaven" was a vacuous film, a woman might pull out the response "what are you doing on here anyway, it's called Handbag... are you gay or desperate to pull or what."
I suppose I adopted a female persona on there for 3 reasons
- experiment in writing and thinking
- latent tranny mentality and fascination with "becoming"/being treated as a member of the opposite sex (I am simplifying complex reasons that I'd find challenging to pin down exactly)
- a feeling that it would make it easier for me to become part of the community.
So, a deception I suppose but not meant as a malicious trick.
In answer to your question, I think there were differences in how I was treated, and how I behaved. (I have posted there as "kovacs" too, and as male personae whom I made no attempt to disguise as other than "kovacs" under a different male name.)
For example -- from memory:
-- I was more apologetic and tentative. This was to a large extent shaped by my environment, as most of the women (female-presenting people I mean) on Handbag behave that way, prefacing disagreement with "I'm probably being stupid but" and ending it with "sorry if I've offended :blush smiley:". A lot of "sorry this is so long" at the start, "sorry I really rambled" at the end. I expect my persona was formed by that, partly because I was adopting the community behaviour and partly because I would have stood out as rude and too forthright if I didn't. (NB this is not a forum quite like Barbelith, and I'd say a lot of women on there are... "girly", with fairy avatars, tickers to their next holiday and so on. I'm sure there is a more proper way to say "girly", eg. they enjoy a certain form of behaviour and identity coded as "feminine", but you probably get what I mean.)
-- My jokes went down more of a storm. Maybe because, as has been suggested on one of these gender threads, we have different expectations of female humour, the community didn't expect a woman to be "funny like a boy". I had people saying "you're so funny", and appreciative lols, which encouraged me to carry on that kind of funny. I felt I was sparkly and witty, because I was treated that way.
-- Maybe as a combination of the relatively non-confrontational style, and my emergent reputation as a funny-girl, a character formed whereby I became quite ditsy. This may also reflect kind of badly on the types of behaviour I (semi-consciously) see as available to a female persona, but that's how it happened, in that community. I became someone who pretended to deliberately misunderstand things to get a laugh, or reported stupid things she'd just done like accidentally saying "lots of love" at the end of a phone call to my manager (I realise I'm mixing up she and my. Also, that kind of Lisa Kudrow behaviour doesn't really work with the sparkly wryness. Maybe one evolved from the other, I don't quite remember.)
Like I say, I realise some of the way the character turned out is a reflection of how I must see young women's roles and accepted behaviour. Some of it is down to the way the community saw that, and responded to me. Much of this behaviour, though, is there in my posts under this name -- mock-innocence, gags (they don't really get noticed on here I think), carefully polite apology, a sometimes prissy, uptight style and, mostly, attempts at good manners.
As an important sidenote, I have two long-running personae on The Moon Online board. One is kovacs; the other is like an idiot savant (I hope that isn't an informal term for autistic; that isn't how I mean it) childlike character, called Steerpike. So I have also had two personae over like 4-5 years, both male, both allowing and enabling different aspects of me. I wouldn't post steerpikey stuff under kovacs, or vice versa.
Ironically, on Handbag, I got caught up in a wide-ranging debate and had to pull out the ditsy stops to really hammer out an argument. As such, I revealed myself, inevitably, through my language and manner, as "kovacs". And, as such, some people were pissed off about me taking on a role. The word "fictionsuit", which I used in my defence, is still spat at me on other boards. I am still perma-banned from Handbag under any name.
Can I ask why you'd want to present as female specifically on Barbelith? You say that "I have participated in another forum as a female-identifying persona, as a kind of experiment for myself in 'passing' and a work of fictional character-building," so are the reasons for wanting to do that here the same?
When I first asked the question, it was just objective curiosity. By my second big post on this thread, I was remembering that I used to actually have fun "being" a "girl". It was liberating in some ways to let out another side of oneself. I was different, just as the Steerpike character is different from kovacs.
I suppose it's like, in real life it's fun to dress up or do your hair differently, and realise you walk differently, talk differently, are treated differently because of how you present. I do that as a man, certainly. Maleness gives opportunities for masquerade... just fewer of them.
But on here, I have one name and that name, even though I don't post much, becomes a "brand". Longer-standing posters have an even more fixed brand identity. So, with one name, there is I think less opportunity for play in presenting than one actually has in real life, with clothes, hair, posture, make-up and so on. |
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